Gluster Expands Open-Source Scale-out NAS

Open-source storage vendor Gluster has introduced a couple of new additions to its scale-out NAS platform. The company claims these are the first scale-out virtual NAS appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Known as the Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances, they come in two flavors – one for virtual machines (VMs) and one for Amazon-based clouds.

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“Gluster’s new offering is representative of the types of major breakthroughs we’re seeing in storage technology for VM and cloud environments, delivering the scale-out architecture that is needed in a highly responsive manner thanks to its software approach to the problem,” said McClure.

Greg Schulz, an analyst with the Server and StorageIO Group, thinks Gluster has a good solution for companies looking to leverage scale-out NAS for traditional, virtual, private or public cloud environments.

“Their approach of providing flexibility to deploy the technology on different platforms to meet various business or application needs is an example of what scale-out should be about – scale functionality, ease of use, flexible to adapt to different needs while supporting performance, availability, capacity and security with multi-tenancy for virtual, physical and cloud environments,” said Schulz. “This removes some complexity from cloud and virtual environments by reducing the need for a cloud access gateway, appliance or software driver, which should help to reduce costs — including management.”